The Power of the Apology

The Power of the Apology

Apparently on Sunday GitHub accidentally deleted an entire database that
caused downtime for quite awhile. If you’re a paying customer, downtime
will piss you off. GitHub’s customers I’m sure were no exception. But
what’s really cool is the way that GitHub responded on their
blog.

Essentially all they did was:

Apologize.

Explain what happened.

Explained plan to avoid similar disasters in the future.

Apologized again.

You know what’s even better? Look how positive the comments are from
their customers.

I first discovered the power of the apology when Jeffrey Kalmikoff spoke
at Big Omaha 2009. He said that the Threadless had lost all of the forum
comments. Threadless was transparent and apologized for the disaster.
Some Threadless community members then scraped the comments off of a
Google cache. They were able to restore a large majority of the
comments! You should watch it.

Take note of this while building your business. When your screw up, give
your customers’ a sincere apology and a plan moving forward. After all,
they deserve it.